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The purpose of this paper is to find an efficient fabric defect detection algorithm by means of exploring the sparsity characteristics of main local binary pattern (MLBP) extracted from the original fabric texture.

In the proposed algorithm, original LBP features are extracted from the fabric texture to be detected, and MLBP are selected by occurrence probability. Second, a dictionary is established with MLBP atoms which can sparsely represent all the LBP. Then, the value of the gray-scale difference between gray level of neighborhood pixels and the central pixel, and the mean of the difference which has the same MLBP feature are calculated. And then, the defect-contained image is reconstructed as normal texture image. Finally, the residual is calculated between reconstructed and original images, and a simple threshold segmentation method can divide the residual image, and the defective region is detected.

The experiment result shows that the fabric texture can be more efficiently reconstructed, and the proposed method achieves better defect detection performance. Moreover, it offers empirical insights about how to exploit the sparsity of one certain feature, e.g. LBP.

Because of the selected research approach, the results may lack generalizability in chambray. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

In this paper, a novel fabric defect detection method which extracts the sparsity of MLBP features is proposed.

To improve humanized management of Chinese teachers, the aim of this study is to, first, investigate the stress of Chinese teachers, and, second, to examine the relationship of teacher stress with coping strategies and social support. Moreover, an attempt is made to examine the moderating role of coping strategies in the relationship between social support and teacher stress.

Participants consisted of 363 teachers from 6 public primary and secondary schools (both regular and vocational schools), who completed 3 self-report questionnaires examining teacher stress, coping strategies and social support. The methodology used was t-test, correlation analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analysis.

There are more than 50 per cent of primary and secondary school teachers suffering from mild to extremely severe stress. Working environment (regular or vocational schools), gender and age affect teacher stress. Social support and passive strategies have significant relationships with teacher stress, and passive strategies moderate the relationship between social support and teacher stress.

The study is based on a sample taken from public primary and secondary schools, and the character of the research was cross-sectional. Therefore, we must be cautious in generalizing the findings. An important implication for management of the findings of this study is the importance of humanized management for teachers. To reduce teacher stress, more social support should be provided by educational administrators, and teachers should be trained to avoid using passive strategies.

Through the investigation into the teacher stress in both regular and vocational schools, this study provides a new point of view for human resource managers to control and reduce teacher stress in China by improved humanized management.

This study aims to decrypt the efforts made by Chinese people's courts nationwide to protect the rights of Chinese posted workers in the Belt & Road (B&R) countries by investigating labour litigation cases with an extraterritorial application of Chinese labour law (under the “doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules”).

This study collected all labour litigation from 2014 to 2018 brought forward by Chinese posted workers in Chinese courts against Chinese enterprises regarding the performance of employment contracts in the B&R countries where Chinese labour laws were mandatorily applied under the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules. The study adopted a qualitive research approach to analyse the compiled cases to explore their characteristics and effects.

This study found that the volume of labour disputes in the B&R countries had a somewhat positive correlation to the amount of investment from China. However, this correlation was rather superficial when compared with the correlation to the type of industrial sector (e.g. the construction sector) and to the claim category (e.g. remuneration claims). Moreover, labour disputes in both the B&R countries and China shared a great deal of similarity with regard to their concentration in certain sectors and in certain types of claims. Therefore, mandatorily applying Chinese labour law could be convenient for Chinese workers returning from abroad who seek remedies and could allow Chinese judges to issue affirmative decisions regardless of the territory in which the worker was posted.

The cases collected by this study were limited to those filed in China by Chinese workers who were hired by Chinese enterprises and sent to work in the B&R countries and did not include those filed in the B&R countries by Chinese posted workers. Future research should therefore attempt to gather a broader range of labour disputes to further clarify the issues and need for labour protection for Chinese posted workers in the B&R countries.

This study argues that the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules is not entirely unproblematic because it might arbitrarily rule out the standards set by foreign labour legislation that could be more favourable to workers or offer them greater protection. Therefore, giving judges a certain degree of discretion is imperative to allow them to apply foreign labour standards when they have been proven to benefit workers.

Apart from a handful of reports on individual cases, there have been very few empirical studies regarding the general picture of labour protection for Chinese posted workers in the B&R countries. This study has adopted a novel approach to collect information on labour disputes in the B&R countries and to facilitate a qualitative analysis to test the practical implications of the doctrine of overriding mandatory labour rules.

The influence of road surface temperature (RST) on vehicles is becoming more and more obvious. Accurate predication of RST is distinctly meaningful. At present, however, the prediction accuracy of RST is not satisfied with physical methods or statistical learning methods. To find an effective prediction method, this paper selects five representative algorithms to predict the road surface temperature separately.

Multiple linear regressions, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, random forest and gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) and neural network are chosen to be representative predictors.

The experimental results show that for temperature data set of this experiment, the prediction effect of GBRT in the ensemble algorithm is the best compared with the other four algorithms.

This paper compares different kinds of machine learning algorithms, observes the road surface temperature data from different angles, and finds the most suitable prediction method.

Although self-sacrificial leadership and ethical leadership exhibit similarities in their moral dimensions, recent research suggests that self-sacrificial leadership may be linked to an increase in unethical behavior for the collective benefit of one’s group. Existing studies have demonstrated that ethical leadership can mitigate organizational cynicism. However, the potential misalignment between group interests and ethics associated with self-sacrificial leadership raises concerns about its potential to foster cynicism. This study investigates the mechanisms by which self-sacrificial leadership influences organizational cynicism.

Survey data from 493 organizational members across 9 Chinese companies were analyzed using multiple regression analysis, and bootstrapping was employed to confirm the mediating effects.

Self-sacrificial leadership was found to have an overall reducing effect on organizational cynicism, with distributive justice and ethical CSR perceptions as significant mediating factors.

This study sheds light on the unique characteristics of self-sacrificial leadership, highlighting the elements of sacrifice and loyalty that may result in unethical, self-centered behaviors, and explores its influence on organizational cynicism. By revealing that the recognition of augmented group interests can diminish cynicism among organizational members regardless of morality, this study contributes to broadening the theoretical perspective.

This empirical study of one of China's biggest take-out platforms during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) explores the legal rights and protections for gig workers' availability time.

The study uses a quantitative survey and interviews of take-out platform riders, investigating the intrinsic features of working time and availability time. Labour law professionals and scholars are interviewed to verify the findings.

The availability time of take-out platform riders is difficult to define under the current legal working-time framework. There is a need for a specific method to define availability time, considering the multiple factors in gig-take-out-sector work. One option is to apply working-time regulations to availability time but to use a proportionality test to preserve flexibility whilst the platform offers protection to the riders during that time.

Pandemic-related travel restrictions limited the authors' study to one take-out platform in Beijing. Future studies should cover a wider geographical area and multiple take-out platforms.

The study uniquely evaluates the availability time of take-out platform riders to determine appropriate public policy and theoretical implications. It proposes a proportionality test regulating riders' availability. In particular, the workers being “at leisure” during availability time could mitigate the platform's liability for full remuneration or moderate the ceiling of working hours. The occupational health and safety of riders must be fully protected, as they are still “at the platform's disposal” at that time.

Servitization has been used widely by manufacturing firms to secure strategic positions in industrial transformation. However, its impact on firms’ market power remains to be investigated, especially in developing countries. This study aims to investigate servitization’s impact on firms’ market power, along with the moderating roles of research and development (R&D) intensity and firm size.

Using the two-stage least squares with instrumental variables (2SLS-IV) method, the authors conduct an empirical analysis of servitization in China based on panel data for 1,797 publicly traded manufacturing firms during the period 2012–2018.

The findings show that servitization helps increase a firm’s market power. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis suggests that embedded servitization increases a firm’s market power, whereas hybrid servitization reduces it. The findings also indicate that this effect varies depending on critical firm conditions. Servitization’s effect on firms’ market power increases with R&D intensity but decreases with manufacturer expansion.

This study describes the positive effects of servitization on firms’ market power in response to calls for research that will adopt a comprehensive business performance perspective on the servitization field.

The findings provide guidance for what type of servitization manufacturing firms should choose and how it fits with their size and R&D capabilities.

This pioneering empirical study uses a large longitudinal data set and the 2SLS-IV method to examine the effects of embedded servitization and hybrid servitization on firms’ market power. The findings provide a new perspective on ongoing discussions of “desertification” and the “service paradox.”

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the institutions involved in providing experience to entrepreneurs in China and analyzed the types of experience they provide. Moreover, the abilities of related organizations to shape experience were analyzed.

By using a multiple case study method, this qualitative study examined various entrepreneurial experience providers (namely incubator, entrepreneurship training institution, franchise store, entrepreneurship training network, and family business experience transfer) to understand the experience types and their supplying competencies.

On the basis of the types of entrepreneurial experience and the criteria for entrepreneurial competency assessment, the study results showed that the primary providers in China are the Start Your Business (SYB) program, incubators, and family businesses. Furthermore, for-profit social training organizations provided less experience than did governmental or private ones. The five providers mainly provided “know-what” entrepreneurial experience. Among the providers, family businesses and SYB offered experience that was conducive to entrepreneurial learning.

Entrepreneurs are the subjects of entrepreneurship education, while this study mainly focused on analyzing the experience supplying competencies. Thus, future studies should explore the required abilities that are developed during entrepreneurship for various learners.

This study interpreted how to achieve Chinese mass entrepreneurship and innovation strategy in the context of the low development of entrepreneurship higher education. To improve their competencies in providing experience, providers must focus on developing proper curricula, effective transfer methods and teacher resources, and incorporating entrepreneurship education.

On the basis of social learning theory and human capital theory, this study developed a set of criteria for the assessment of the ability of entrepreneurial experience providers. This study analyzed how related institutions enhanced entrepreneurial experience, thereby expanding the relevant learning channels and providing options for entrepreneurs to accumulate experience in China.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the actual legal effect of collective agreements by focusing on the litigation regarding the implementation of collective agreements in China where current literature on the topic is scarce.

This paper deploys both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the features of litigation regarding collective agreements. The judgments on collective agreement by people’s courts nationwide from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2018 provide the primary empirical data. The intrinsic features of collective agreement disputes are investigated to delineate different sorts of theoretically presumed legal effect, namely contractual, normative and other (if any). A number of collective agreement templates and texts have been gathered and analysed to further explore the factors leading to collective agreement disputes. A dozen of labour law professionals, workers, scholars and trade union officials, were interviewed to verify the findings.

The number of collective agreement disputes is relatively small compared to the number of valid collective agreements or the volume of other labour disputes. This study found no litigation initiated by trade unions to claim a remedy against a violation of a collective agreement by an employer. However, a growing number of cases were filed by individual workers to complain about the terms and conditions of their individual employment agreements in contradiction to the existing collective agreement. These data do not mean that collective agreements lack problems or have no significance in action. A novel effect – a “substitution effect” – is evident in the existing labour litigations and relatively popular amongst employers, as they often refer to the collective agreement when a written individual agreement, as the mandatory document, is absent. The advent of substitution effect reflects a pragmatic view amongst Chinese labour law professionals, employers and workers.

Due to the recent establishment of the online judgments database, this study has focused on collective agreement litigation in people’s courts from 2014 to 2018, which is representative of the national trend of such disputes and thus provides valuable insights. Future studies should cover a wider time span and extend to the collective agreement disputes subject to labour arbitration to provide a fuller picture of the challenges and potential solutions.

By understanding the legal effect of collective agreements in reality, the legislature, workers and employers can act accordingly to enhance or empower it. The insignificant volume of both contractual and normative claims on collective agreements indicates the pressing need to inject something concrete into both substantive rights and the implementation mechanisms of collective agreements. The existence of substitution claims illustrates the room for further implementation of written individual agreements to reduce the need to borrow from collective agreements to fill the void left by the absence of individual agreements.

This study uniquely evaluates collective agreement disputes in China to seek their true legal effect, finding the substitution effect of collective agreements that was absent from the prior literature. The features of collective agreements are reflected in this work, together with public policy and theoretical implications.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the research on the influence of tech-innovation behavior on tech-innovation performance for Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Environmental performance has been taken into consideration with the green manufacturing and sustainability philosophy being a hotspot.

To verify the hypotheses and assumptions, a questionnaire was designed and a semi-structured interview was conducted for data collection. In addition, structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to verify the influence model through assessing the fitting indexes based on the 317 questionnaire responses in the form of Likert-type scale.

Tech-innovation behavior and activity from direction, mode and investment behavior dimensions show their different positive influences on tech-innovation performance. This paper has creatively taken environmental tech-innovation performance into consideration, as well as economic performance. This investigation has provided the interpretation for each individual enterprise from three dimensions when conducting tech-innovation activity.

Tech-innovation behavior, which has been a subject of extended discussion during recent decades, is the effective activity or action for tech-innovation. However, there have not been any studies on the environmental performance influence study, as well as the economic performance from these three dimensions and framework.

As this paper discusses the tech-innovation performance influence study from three dimensions, individual enterprises can choose the corresponding action for the proper tech-innovation path, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

This study helps managers recognize tech-innovation activities for better tech-innovation performance based on the empirical study.